


the idiot's guide on how not to hop realities

by KatRoma



Series: of pinwheels and paper daffodils [12]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, But Also Of Pinwheels and Paper Daffodils Compliant, Canon Compliant, Canon Crossover, Canon Uchiha Sasuke, F/M, Female Uchiha Sasuke, Gift Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-11 05:32:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4423271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatRoma/pseuds/KatRoma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's not a lot that surprises Sasuke. Finding out there's an alternate reality where he's a girl has to be an exception.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the idiot's guide on how not to hop realities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Enailuj](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enailuj/gifts).



> Continuity with the Rinnegan? What continuity? Also, I am so sorry for how long this took to get out.
> 
> Anyway, this literally explains almost every change I made to canon (both accidently because of translation issues with the manga I read, and on purpose). It can actually easily fit into the rest of the series, which is kind of hilarious, but disregards Gaiden because my laptop refused to load it on any site. Seriously.

“Just call me Sayu,” the girl said when she and Sasuke realized they were each other, but she looks so much like a female version of his brother, of a slimmer version of his mother, and of an older version of his daughter, even, that he can’t help but look at her and see a nameless conglomeration of family then and now. “I’ve used it on missions before, so I’ll answer.”

It wasn’t difficult piecing together who they are—they both have the Rinnegan, and activated the Sharingan out of instinct only to find the identical chakra signature of their own combined with Itachi’s racing through their bodies, caused by using their eyes. “I’m still new to this,” she said once the confusion was done, motioning the Rinnegan. “Screwing up happens a lot. _You_ don’t look surprised.”

After everything he’s been through, very little surprises him. He doesn’t know if he should explain why.

Now they’re sitting opposite each other, leaning against separate tree trunks with a fire blazing between them. It’s spring, and they’re just inside the Land of Fire’s border, the temperature considerably higher than it was in the northern Land of Earth, where he was for the past week on a mission for Naruto. All Sasuke wants to do is be home in time for Sarada’s first day at the Academy, a feat he thought he’d managed when he finished two weeks earlier than the deadline. Leaving this other Sasuke—this Sayu, himself, herself—alone in a world she knows but doesn’t would be a terrible idea, though, and he can’t imagine bringing her back to Konoha. It won’t be long before she recovers from overexertion, if he’s lucky. If he isn’t, he’ll bring her back himself, as annoying as that is.

She pokes at the fire with the stick, and for the first time, he sees that the Rinnegan reflects light like a cat’s eyes. “How old are you?” she asks, glancing up briefly. With her hair pulled back in a loose bun, she looks like his mother did on cleaning days, and the similarity is unnerving. “You’re obviously older than me. It’s weird.” Her accent is off, less like Konoha and more like someone from the Land of Rain.

“Twenty-seven,” he answers, and looks her over. Unlike him, who’s dressed in more official shinobi clothing, she’s dressed for bed; the light blue, cotton shorts, and white sleeveless shirt are almost replicas of what Sakura will sleep in during the summer months. “I’m guessing you’re seventeen.”

When he developed the Rinnegan, he had just turned seventeen, and though their timelines obviously differ, he assumes events are similar enough. It’s just as off-putting for him as it is for her, because of this, when she, the other him, says, “Where’d you get seventeen from? I’ve only been fifteen for a couple of months.”

If she’s this early into fifteen, the cursed seal should be there, but in the flickering firelight, he sees her shoulder is blank. There should be scars, too, from Orochimaru’s training, or light puncture marks still visible from the fight with Haku years ago on the bridge in the Land of Waves. Instead, all he can see is a slight discoloration on her arm about the length and thinness of a piece of origami paper, and barely noticeable.

The events that make up their lives must not be so similar after all, and suddenly his way of thinking of her changes from another version of himself to Sayu, as she said.

“The Rinnegan,” he says, pushing his hair from his face to reveal his own again. It’s rare he even allows it to show in his own home. “Hagoromo’s spirit didn’t give me half his power until I was seventeen.”

A narrow-eyed, pressed lip look of confusion too remarkably like Sarada’s crosses Sayu’s face. “‘Hagoromo’s spirit?’” she repeats. “Who’s Hagoromo?”

He blinks. “You,” he starts to say, and pauses. “How did you develop the Rinnegan?”

“It’s kind of hazy, to be honest,” she says. “I was in the Sound Country—”

“Sound Country?”

“Don’t you have one here?”

They stare at each other, the same person from two different realities, and yet not the same at all. In the shifting light of the moon, she _does_ look like him, with the same shaped nose and the same shaped eyes and the same pale skin. Then a cloud passes over the moon, leaving half her face in shadow, and the sameness disappears in an instant.

There’s no part of this he ever wanted to experience, nor thought he ever would.

With a vague shrug, he says, “Sort of. We call it the Land of Sound. Everything is ‘Land of’ here. Do you call everywhere ‘Country?’”

“Yeah. Guess there’s more than just sex differences,” she says. “Figured. Your accent’s all wrong.” The difference in accent is something he noticed, too, but as their home country is the Land of Fire, he privately thinks his is more right than hers. “Anyway, I was in the Sound Country, Land of Sound, whatever, killing Orochimaru and I almost died, because I’m good, but it’s a terrible idea to fight a legendary sannin when sick, and then the Rinnegan just happened.”

When he was her age, he still had four months before he would kill Orochimaru. An odd chill runs down Sasuke’s spine at the realization she’s significantly more powerful than he ever could have hoped to have been at fifteen. “Well,” he says as she pokes the fire again so a flame shoots upward, dancing fleetingly in the air before dying out with a spark, “regardless of how or when the Rinnegan formed for you, I’m surprised you don’t know about Hagoromo. That’s Uchiha family history.”

Then she shrugs, in the same vague, single-shoulder way. “My knowledge of family history,” she says, “doesn’t really extend past the whole Senju-Uchiha bullshit. Itachi and my parents never told me that much, and Obito’s been laying off lately. I think he’s worried my body might do me in before any of his grand plans can save me. How’re you alive, by the way?”

There are so many parts to the short statement he needs to address, but all he says instead is “Luck, mostly. Why?”

Again, she shrugs. Somewhere in the forest, far in the distance, a wolf howls, signalling its pack. “Because I already know this is completely incurable,” she answers, then glances up again. “But you don’t even seem like you were ever sick, or you would’ve answered something more concrete than ‘luck.’”

“Sick,” he says, and remembers what Obito told him years ago, back when Obito was pretending to be Madara, and Sasuke was sixteen and stupid and gullible. “Sick like Itachi was sick?” She nods. If she has the Mangekyo Sharingan, then Itachi must be dead already, too. “Oh. Even Sakura or Tsunade?”

Even as young as fifteen, Sakura could likely heal an illness, but Sasuke’s suspicions are confirmed when Sayu glances to her lap, loose strands of hair falling over her face, and says, “I’m not exactly in Konoha right now. But I’m guessing you figured that out when I mentioned Obito.”

She pulls her legs to her chest, and wraps skinny arms around skinny knees. Though he must have once, he doesn’t remember ever looking so young. “So you have to deal with him, too?” he says. “As a version of you that’s already had to, my advice is just run. Run right back to Konoha and your team.”

“Obito’s not that bad,” she says, and sighs when he lifts an eyebrow skeptically. “Fine, so he’s a little obsessive. But he has his good days. And I can’t just leave everyone else.” Sasuke runs his fingers through his hair and breathes out, trying to absorb the implications, but before he can say anything, she spots his arm for the first time, and asks, “What happened there?”

The prosthetic looks, for the most part, like a real arm covered in bandages, but he prefers to sit or stand in a way that keeps it out of sight. He hesitates before asking, “If you’re not in Konoha, then where are you?” because if she has the same conflict with Naruto that he did at her age, Sasuke doesn’t want to give her any information that might lead to a different outcome in a fight.

“Amegakure,” she says, which matches her accent, though it shouldn’t have changed so drastically in two and a half years. “It’s been like two years since Obito saved me from that group of Oto-nin who decided it would be fun to steal a half-dead girl out of a hospital, and took me back to Konan and Pein. Right now I’m supposed to be in my bedroom but—what?”

“Konan and Pein,” he says, thoughts coming to a halt. “Konan and Pein as the in the Konan and Pein in Ame who’re in control of the Akatsuki?”

As she looks up again through her bangs, lit only by the moving firelight now that the moon is covered in its entirety, she looks too much like Sarada. “Yeah,” Sayu says, in the same bratty tone he had when he was much younger than her, and thought he was right about everything. “Who else would I be talking about? Wait, you mean you never went to Ame? Ever?”

She seems almost hurt when he shakes his head. “I lived for twelve years in Konoha,” he says, “and then, like an idiot, believed Orochimaru and went off with him. How did—”

“ _Orochimaru?_ ” she says, and he realizes that to her, Orochimaru must not have been dead more than a few weeks at most. “But didn’t he bite you? He bit me. And he’s the reason Itachi’s dead, and my first team, and the Sandaime, and he attacked Naruto and Sakura, too. Didn’t all that happen with you?”

“No,” Sasuke says, mystified. “He killed the Sandaime, but Team Seven’s my only team. You’re in the Akatsuki, but Itachi—when did he die?”

There’s a long, agitated silence where she taps her fingers against her knee and bites her lip, before her story comes out in a rush. Her words paint of a picture of a life that could have been, one with no curse or all encompassing ambition. It’s left her less naive than he was, from the sound of it, but just as lost, too.

When she runs out of words, silence falls over their small clearing again, the only noise the sparks of the fire, and distant animals too afraid of the flames to get close. Finally, he says, “Itachi never brought me with him. The Tsukuyomi worked, and I grew up in Konoha. It wasn’t until after he died that I found out about the conspiracy. But here, the Infinite Tsukuyomi worked, for a little while. The nine Tailed Beasts were collected. It...doesn’t leave the world in that great of a state.”

For as different as they are, their thought process seems to be the same, and he can unfortunately understand the leap she made between loyalty and participating in something she doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with. “You mean it can work?” she says. “Konan always seems so skeptical about the Eye of the Moon plan that I’ve just been hoping that it all falls apart on its own. What happened? And now can I know what happened to your arm?”

More concisely than she did, he explains his life, omitting what he can. This isn’t the sort of night where he wants to be judged by himself, and as she’s him, he imagines she can jump to conclusions quick enough. She watches him intently, mismatched eyes flat in the light, as he draws the symbols he and Naruto once had on their hands into the dirt. Once she coughs, hard but short into her elbow, and rubs the blood away absentmindedly on her shirt. The red stays there on the white fabric, dark in the night, and smeared across her lips. He never thought to wonder what it would be like to be sick before, even when he found out about his brother.

Then another thought occurs to him, and he stops, stick stationary in the ground where the two ends of the Haruno circle meet around the Uchiha fan.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “What’s that?”

Maybe if he were fifteen, too, they would look more alike, but instead if anyone saw she and his daughter next to each other, they’d never question an assumption the two were sisters. In this other reality—the one with this other him—a grandfather died of the same disease that later manifested Itachi and now in his younger sister, but Sasuke has a vague memory of his grandfather dying from a lung disease, too. If it was hereditary there, there’s no reason to think it might not be here, and it skipped him. Here, though, he has Sarada, who carries the same genetics.

He looks from the family symbol to the girl across from him. “Uh,” he says, uncomfortable in the face of the knowledge that he might have this despite all his mistakes, but she’ll never be able to, “I have a family now. I married Sakura. We have a daughter named Sarada.”

“Oh, you’re serious,” she says, momentary horror flashing across her face. “I can’t believe this. She was best friend. That’s not something I needed to picture.”

“I wasn’t with anyone when I was your age, either,” he says, and she frowns. He forces any hypothetical thought about his daughter out of his mind. “Well, I’ve caught you up now. That’s what happens if everything goes as planned.”

“So, what?” she says. “I just go back to Konoha? I mean, I have no plans to fight Naruto, but considering how my track record looks, I’m pretty sure they’d rather kill me instead. Economically, they’re not doing that well, and there’s more than one jounin who probably wouldn’t mind getting twenty-four million ryo from the Tsuchikage.”

“ _Twenty-four million?_ ”

Before the Kages Summit, Sasuke made it into the Bingo Book, but his stubborn refusal to kill anyone at the time kept his bounty relatively low. Not even Itachi’s was twenty-four million when he was fifteen. With complete seriousness, though, she says, “Yeah, for now, but it’ll probably go up for killing Orochimaru. You should’ve seen the price the Tsuchikage put on my head just for killing some random jounin who attacked me.”

Sasuke shakes his head and throws another log on the fire. “Look,” he says, “I screwed up a lot and it still took three years for the Godaime to the declare me a missing-nin. You’re still young, and Konoha’s the village of second chances. If you want to go back, go back.”

Though everything was disorienting and uncertain when he first returned, he had his team, and the village slowly accepted him again. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and if it could to him, it can happen to another version of him. When he was fifteen, it would’ve been nice to have someone sit him down and talk some sense into him, and she doesn’t seem to have gone too far yet. Maybe he can at least give someone else a chance to avoid making similar mistakes.

“The people in Konoha must be nicer here,” she says, curling into herself. “I literally saved everyone from a Jinchuruki loosed on the village, and the only thanks I got was three days of interrogation. I don’t want to end up back in that room ever again.”

“No, the interrogation squad are still assholes here,” he says. “I think you need to be born a certain type of person to work there.”

She sighs, and adjusts herself, folding her legs down to sit with them crossed, hands curled lap. “Yeah, I guess,” she says. “But it’s more than that. You don’t know because you just never lived with the Akatsuki the way I have. Everyone’s really close, like a family, for the most part. Hidan and Kakuzu were shoved together because they’re the odd ones out, but the point is that I can’t just leave all of them for the village that killed Sasori. But, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Obito can get Naruto whenever he wants. They don’t really need my eyes, even if they think they do, and I’m dying too fast to catch all the others first anyway. And if they do all attack Konoha, they _will_ win.”

Here, when the Akatsuki attacked Konoha, they lost because of Naruto, Sakura told Sasuke years later. At sixteen, though, without a Rinnegan or an Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan or partners strong enough to destroy a village, he attacked five Kage and survived. If the Akatsuki attack with this girl, who has all of that and the ability to control the Kyuubi, Konoha might fail after all.

At least whatever happens won’t affect this reality, he thinks, but the thought is a sour one.

“All the Akatsuki members here died within two years of capturing the Isobu,” he says, and she jerks her head up, eyes wide. “Sakura killed Sasori. She told me about it during the time we were on the same side during the war. You know Shikamaru, Ino, and Chouji, right? Well, they killed Kakuzu and trapped Hidan. I killed Itachi and Deidara. The rest I don’t know specifics about. I just know they’re dead.”

Frowning, she says, “But they didn’t have me—or you, I guess. Hidan and Kakuzu can go away for all I care. They freak me out like Orochimaru did. But if I keep getting sent out alone like I did with the Saiken Jinchuruki, then I’ll never have to draw attention to myself, and everyone else’ll be fine. Right? Except, then,” she continues before he can answer, biting her lip and pushing her bangs from her face. “Anyway,” she says, changing subjects abruptly. “How old’s your daughter? Sarada?”

Konoha doesn’t need to worry, he thinks as he looks over again, and sees all his own signs of anxiety exaggerated by someone more expressive. He gives her a year before she can’t handle the stress any longer. “Seven,” he says. “She starts the Academy in a week and a half.”

“Make sure to tell her,” she starts, then stops. “Wait, seven? You and Sakura were _twenty_ when you had a kid? That’s barely older than me.”

“That’s normal,” he says, and privately thinks there’s a larger gap between fifteen and twenty than teenagers realize. “Your mom would’ve only been twenty-one when she had Itachi. Kids are complicated—having a life outside of missions is complicated. I’m sure it’s the same in Ame as is it is in Konoha. Look at least the mother’s age in proportion to their children, and you’ll see most had their first between eighteen and twenty-five.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she says, and pushes her bangs away from her face again. “Well, tell your daughter to pay attention in kunoichi lessons. They might be terrible, but they’re useful.”

When she explained their differences, she hadn’t mentioned her Konoha Academy years, and it didn’t occur to him until she says it that her lessons were different. Any fondness Sakura uses to talk about her kunoichi lessons ends with her friendship with Ino, and though his mother was no longer in the field, she was never particularly feminine. On Sarada’s first day, she won’t have Baruto or Inojin with her, but Sasuke doubts it’ll be long before she has new friends. She’s already taken after her mother in social skills, thankfully.

Sayu cups her hands together, and focuses on her palms, saying, “Every little girl wants a present on her first day. This is nothing, but you probably have actually nothing.” Then, from seemingly nowhere, an origami flower appears in her hands, the lines crisp and straight and perfect. “Oh. Okay. I did have enough chakra.”

“How did you do that?” he says as she stands, walking silently on bare feet around the fire to present the flower. He takes it, twirling the twisted stem between his fingers, and finds no lingering chakra trace on the paper.

Rocking back on her heels, she says, “Like this,” and cups hands again, releasing a couple paper birds to flutter around their heads. “Didn’t you ever see Konan fight?”

He had, but she only made straight sheets of paper appear, or shuriken. “Never likes this,” he says as the birds flock back to Sayu, and disappear against her skin as though they were never there at all. “She taught you this?”

“Well, yeah, she’s the one who invented it,” she says. “You’re a guy, and you’re pretty tall, so I’m assuming you’re strong. I’m not, even now, so she taught me this and how to fight with paper fans so I could use my opponent's’ strength them. Lacing it with lightning didn’t come until a couple of years ago. See, when you’re a kunoichi, you sort of get the short end of the stick. Sakura can probably tell you. Even kunoichi lessons can basically be summed up with ‘you aren’t _really_ as good as your classmates in room ten are, and we aren’t allowed to teach you manipulation anymore, so we’re going to teach you to smile and color coordinate.’ That’s why there’s such a high dropout rate. It’s not fun getting told you’re less. Unless things are drastically different, that’s what your daughter’s walking into.

“But, when I was a kid—” She breaks to cough again into her elbow, the sound wet and painful, before wiping the blood away with a disappointed resignation on her face. “Sorry. Anyway, when I was a kid, Konan told me ‘we’re kunoichi before we’re shinobi, and we’re shinobi before we’re women,’ because a kunoichi’s just the feminine word for shinobi, but there’s still a difference. Sakura would get it. So, when Sarada comes home crying because her male friends are obviously having more fun than she is, make sure just to be blunt and not give her some pandering excuse like the Academy does, because little girls do see through bullshit.”

When Sasuke left, Sarada was excited about her first day, but already complaining about the separated classes. He hopes Sayu’s version is worse, because that sounds awful. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, running a hand down his face. She took a life lesson about femininity, and weaponized it in the form of origami, which proves she’s just as likely to go to the extreme as he is. Before he can add anything, she suddenly shudders, and sinks back into her cross-legged position in an awkward, shaking movement that leaves her face even paler. “You know,” he tells her as she presses a hand to her ribs, “you’ll only die faster if you keep hopping realities with the Rinnegan for the fun of it.”

There’s a difference between training, healthy curiosity, and fucking around. Taking her condition into consideration, straining herself so drastically falls solidly into the final category regardless of what she calls it. “I’m fine,” she says, defensive. “I bet I have enough chakra to get back now. I should probably get back before anyone can find me.”

He looks to her blankly. “Are you saying no one knows?”

“I never said that,” she says as her shoulders tense. “Deidara knows.”

“Did he find out accidentally, and then you had him promise not to tell? Because that’s what I would’ve done.”

With a quiet huff of annoyance and a glare, she says, “You’re me, not Itachi. You can lay off the lecturing.”

It’s not often Sasuke is compared to his brother in personality, and it catches him off guard. “Yeah, whatever,” he says when he recovers. “But you aren’t the only one with a Rinnegan. I’ll get you back.”

As he stands, she stays seated, and says, “Then you’ll be too tired to walk back to Konoha. Whole realities are far.”

Despite her misgivings, she still accepts his hand when he holds it out, and allows herself to be pulled up. For the first time, he realizes she’s even smaller than Sakura. “Which one of us is the older one?” he says. “Our chakra levels don’t even compare. One night’s sleep after I get back here and I’ll be fine.”

“Then why didn’t you just suggest this earlier?” Sayu asks.

“Because the Rinnegan is just unpleasant,” he answers, and grips her arm. “Direct us. I’ll do the rest.”

They activate their eyes at the same time, bodies lighting up with their identical chakra signatures, and then she leads him from his reality into hers, using his chakra to do it.

When they come to a halt, she falls away, unused to the sensation, and sits on a bed with a pale green comforter. Though the thin white curtains are drawn over the window on the far wall, he can still clearly hear the sound of rain colliding drop by drop against the glass. Lightning booms overhead. A single picture sits on a plain wooden dresser in the corner next to a small, clear vase of multicolored pinwheels, and for the first time in years, Sasuke sees Itachi at an age older than thirteen.

On the bed across from him, Sayu—or, no, she’s the Sasuke now—gasps quietly, painfully, before saying, in a whisper, “It’s the only picture I have of anyone in the family. Didn’t even see what it looked until a couple of years ago. He’s like a month from sixteen.”

Itachi is smiling wider than Sasuke ever remembers, leaning against a sun dappled brick wall creeping with ivy in civilian clothes with his little sister at his side, hand on her head to hold her in line of the camera. With her hair tied back, the girl in the picture could almost pass as a boy, could pass as Sasuke at that age, too, who was more delicate looking when he was younger than most of his male classmates. The similarity is much more obvious here than it is now, as if the picture is some sort of deviation point. He takes a quick glance of the rest of the room, of the antique hand fan painted in the colors of the sunrise pinned over her bed, of the books on her shelf by authors whose names he’s never heard or heard only in passing in foreign countries, and the pressed flowers kept in glass on the walls. At her age, he had nowhere to call home, and when he did before he left Konoha, his room was always barren.

Suddenly, he understands the crossed loyalties he’d never experienced. What he’s learned over the years is that the Uchiha clan’s greatest flaw is caring too much in all the wrong ways, but family doesn’t need to be blood related. As long as she keeps the clan name, she’ll never belong fully to anywhere else, but this is more of a home than he had for most of his childhood and adolescence. It’s just a shame this is killing her.

“I can’t believe it takes a bedroom to surprise you,” she says, still whispering, and leans over to open the middle drawer of the dresser, removing a thin blue sweater. As she tugs it on, and slips off the sleeveless sleeping shirt from underneath the way Sakura did when they were gennin, she continues, “What, did you not expect any version of you to be this girly?”

He feels embarrassed by the truth, regardless of how long it’s been, and looks back to the top shelf for an excuse before instead saying, “No. I just didn’t know flowers grow here,” in a voice as low as hers. Somewhere in this building are other members of the Akatsuki, and he’s acutely aware of the danger that presents.

Next to her bed is a dresser, with the bottom two layers drawers, and the first a shelf of books. Though he hadn’t noticed it at first, there’s a single yellow rose in a thin glass vase between two books, one a thick deep blue hardcover titled _Political Methodology_ with the author’s name covered by a Bingo Book lying horizontal in front of it and the other a thin black paperback with _The Children of Izanagi and Other Fire Country Myths_ written down the spine. The author’s name is Chinatsu Akemi, whose name Sasuke recognizes from a thin black paperback with a spine just as bent that once sat on his own bookshelf, and now on Sarada’s. Theirs, though, is titled _The Sage of the Six Paths and Other Shinobi Legends._

“The only ones that grow here are in roof boxes that don’t require a lot of sunlight,” Sayu is saying, drawing his attention away from the book, and back to her. He’s too big for this small room, standing awkwardly on the bare wooden floor, suffocated by differences. A chokuto not unlike his rests in the corner between the closet and the plain white wall. “But that’s from a kid in a Wind Country market who was giving them out for free.”

A possibility occurs to him, and he looks again to the bookshelf. “Who’s Izanagi?” he asks. “I’m taking it that doesn’t mean the Sharingan technique.” Then he explains the change in titles.

She looks from the book to him, expression caught between amused and horrified. “You’re joking,” she says. “The Sage of the Six Paths is some children’s story made up when the first Kage Summit was called and everyone decided on a universal language so the different villages would have some in common. How’d the clan think up names for all the techniques?”

Creating a universal language happened in the first Kage Summit in his reality, too, but the legend of the Sage of the Six Paths was around long before that. “It’s not just a story for us,” Sasuke says. “I don’t know where the names came from. When I mentioned Otsutsuki, Kaguya, Zetsu—you didn’t recognize any of those names?”

“I thought they were just people or spirits,” she says. “Every country and culture here has its own mythology, but they’re all basically different names for the same things. No one knows how or why kekkei genkai form. Amaterasu is the sun goddess, her brother Tsukuyomi the god of the moon, and their other brother Susanoo the god of storms. They were born from Izanagi when he cleansed himself from a trip to Yomi, the underworld, where he failed getting his wife Izanami back from. She sent a creature after him that he split into pieces, which I think are supposed to be the Tailed Beasts. For every fifty hundred souls he creates, she takes a thousand. That’s where the Sharingan techniques got their name from.”

To Sasuke, these names never meant anymore to him than what each technique could do. It’s odd to think that for her, everything has an added weight of a deeper meaning. “I was confused before,” he says, “when you said you used Kamui and the Tsukuyomi. For us, every Mangekyo Sharingan has its own techniques, and no more than that. They must come from different sources.”

She goes to say something, but stops, and looks to the door, sensing the nearing chakra signature in the same moment he does, even though her range shouldn’t be this long at fifteen. “You should go,” she says. “You can take the book if you want and read them to your daughter as fiction. I haven’t read it in years.”

After a second’s hesitation, he does, curiosity getting the better of him. Then he activates the Rinnegan again, pulling himself away, and hears a knock on a door and whispered voice ask, “Sasuke-chan, you still awake?”

There’s an invitation in Deidara’s question that Sasuke never hears the answer to, because as quickly as he left, he’s back on the grass by his dying fire, book in hand and paper flower in his pocket and a readiness to just be home deep set in his bones. 

**Author's Note:**

> The mythology is mostly accurate, except Izanami sent shikome, not any kind of chakra beast thing, obviously.


End file.
